Lesson Plans|Enriching Academic Vocabulary: Strategies for Teaching Tier Two Words to E.L.L. Students

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Enriching Academic Vocabulary: Strategies for Teaching Tier Two Words to E.L.L. Students

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Image from “What is America to Me?,” an Op-Ed about teaching English language learners. Mr. Feralazzo used the piece with his own E.L.L. students.CreditCreditYann Kebbi

By Larry Ferlazzo

Nov. 29, 2017

Yes, the vocabulary in New York Times articles can be challenging, and teachers of English language learners may assume it’s too hard for their students.

But Larry Ferlazzo, who writes for us regularly about how he uses The Times in his E.L.L. classroom, has taught with articles on everything from climate change to Valentine’s Day, and he has a few tips to share.

• Tier One words are the words of everyday speech usually learned in the early grades, albeit not at the same rate by all children. They are not considered a challenge to the average native speaker, though English language learners of any age will have to attend carefully to them.

• Tier Two words are far more likely to appear in written texts than in speech. They appear in all sorts of texts: informational texts (words such as relative, vary, formulate, specificity, and accumulate), technical texts (calibrate, itemize, periphery), and literary texts (misfortune, dignified, faltered, unabashedly). Tier Two words often represent subtle or precise ways to say relatively simple things— saunter instead of walk, for example.

• Tier Three words are specific to a domain or field of study (lava, carburetor, legislature, circumference, aorta) and key to understanding a new concept within a text. Because of their specificity and close ties to content knowledge, Tier Three words are far more common in informational texts than in literature. Recognized as new and “hard” words for most readers (particularly student readers), they are often explicitly defined by the author of a text, repeatedly used, and otherwise heavily scaffolded (e.g., made a part of a glossary).

Of course, English language learners, particularly newcomers, must practice Tier One vocabulary daily, and I have written about how to do this in previous Learning Network posts. For instance, the Picture Word Inductive Model is one of my favorite strategies, and I explain how to apply it here.

But Tier Two words, as the authors of the Standards point out, “are frequently encountered in complex written texts and are particularly powerful because of their wide applicability to many sorts of reading.”

This is why, when I’m working with English language learners, I mainly focus on this tier. There is simply more bang for your teaching buck: Learning these words will make more texts accessible to your students.

To start, you can find many lists of such words online, from this one by the Smarter Balanced test consortium to this one from Flocabulary to this one collected by the author Jim Burke.

First, I pronounce the word, and usually write it on the board or overhead as well. Mr. Marzano doesn’t explicitly point out the act of pronunciation in the six-step process. However, it is a crucial step for E.L.L.s.

Then, I describe the word using various examples, sometimes with an image, sometimes using it in different sentences, or, often, both.

Next, students actively process the word through writing their own definitions (in English or in a home language) and drawing their own images. They can use an online dictionary for ideas, but need to be reminded not to copy a definition word-for-word. Of course, this takes teacher modeling and student practice. I also encourage students to use the word in an original sentence. Here is a sample activity sheet (PDF) so students can follow this sequence.

I try to complete these first three steps on the same day that new vocabulary is introduced.

I then take on the last three activities — reinforcing exercises, student discussions and games — over the next several days and beyond.

It’s important to look at these six steps as a compass and not as a road map. In other words, keep them in mind, but don’t apply them dogmatically in every instance.

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Practical ideas for teaching tier two words found in The Times and other texts

Tools to Surface Words and Word Patterns

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A graphic of the first four paragraphs of this Times article, created with a tool called WordSift. Can your students guess what the article will be about?

Word Sift is also a tool specifically designed to help teachers, especially those with E.L.L. students, “manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials” by identifying key words to teach in any text.

Teachers might try putting the text of a Times article into the tool to quickly surface words to teach. You can use the functions to sort the words alphabetically, by how common or rare they are, and by their appearance on various word lists, including an Academic Word List.

One other way to use this tool that might make a fun challenge for students: Create a graphic, like the one in the image above, of the first several paragraphs of an article you’re about to read, and invite students to guess what that article will be about.

What would your students guess about the graphic we’ve created from this 2017 article? How did they make those guesses?

Using some of the steps I outlined in the Marzano method above along with this activity sheet, you can pronounce two or three words at a time and then give students several minutes to access any prior knowledge and look up the meanings online. Students can then write the definition in their home language and in English (in their own words, of course, not copied from the dictionary).

Next, students share with a partner and make any needed revisions. Finally, the entire class reviews those words with the teacher calling on students to share what they wrote and drew. That process is then repeated until all the words are reviewed.

This all culminates, of course, in the class reading the text — everyone together, in pairs, or individually. You may choose to ask students to circle the targeted words as they go.

For homework, you might divide up the words and ask each student to make a small poster for one of them that you can tape onto an Interactive Word Wall.

Students can also create their own versions of Word Charts when reading a text and then identify and define words that are new to them.

For instance, I wanted my students to read a recent Op-Ed in The Times called “What Is America To Me?” It is written by a woman who volunteers to help English language learners at a local public school. My class and I were reading this text as part of a series of activities done to deal with the stress of news about the Trump Administration’s latest crackdown on immigration. It was not part of a “close reading” exercise in which the emphasis would have been on reading and rereading the text; my intent was simply to share the information with them.

To make it more accessible to them, I modified it in various ways. Here is my version of the article, and, at the end of the document, a list of the changes I made and why I made them.

First, students numbered the paragraphs and defined new words using this “Identifying Words While Reading” chart, which asks them to write definitions in English and in their home language, then draw an image.

Next, students read the article on their own, completing portions of the chart as they went. They took a break every seven minutes or so to teach their classmates what they learned and share summaries of each paragraph.

Afterward, of course, we discussed the message of the article, and what it made them think and feel. Here is how the piece ends — a paragraph I didn’t modify at all:

School’s out for summer now, but I can’t stop thinking about all those brand-new Americans recalling the countries of their birth, using the poetry of their new language to convey the beauty of home. English is a problematic language, but these students are working hard to learn it — and working harder still to belong.

Word Webs

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From left, Eli Harold, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, of the San Francisco 49ers, kneel during the national anthem before a game against the Seattle Seahawks on Sept. 25, 2016. Related ArticleCreditTed S. Warren/Associated Press

Words Webs are also known as Semantic Mapping and Word Mapping, but all of these describe graphic organizers that in some way visualize connections between words and help students understand them. Teachers can use them in endless ways, as this Learning Network lesson plan, or a Google image search, will show. They typically have one word or concept in the middle (“Climate Change” or “American Dream”) words and phrases branching off.

I keep our Word Webs simple, and generally use them in preparation for a writing assignment. For instance, I might use a version to help students identify words that fit under the five senses.

Or, I’ll identify an important word that would be key to a text they are reading and which they will be writing about. For example, I focused on the word “protest” before reading The Times article, High School Students on Why They Protest Anthems And Pledges, and had students identify synonyms in a Word Web.

One way to help students visualize this is to show them the first two images in this Times slide show about the work of artist Mel Bochner and the “Secret Power of Synonyms,” then ask them to create their own versions.

I’ve been doing this activity with my E.L.L. students for years, primarily using Instagram because of its easy “stop action” feature. They accompany their narration with a series of colorful sheets first showing the word then their own definition, followed by a sentence using the word, then a cartoon illustrating the sentence and ending with the word again.

Teacher or Student-Created Cloze Exercises

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From a hugging marathon in Thailand to naked bungee jumping in Latvia, different cultures celebrate Valentine’s Day in their own way.CreditCreditEd Alcock for The New York Times

Clozes, also known as “fill-in-the-blanks” or “gap-fills,” are relatively short texts with key words removed so students must use context clues.

Clozes can be excellent tools to help students enhance their vocabulary and develop metacognitive skills, especially if they are challenged to explain the “clues” in the text that assisted them in choosing the correct answer. I often model this by explaining that clues can come either before or after the blank, then circling a clue word and drawing an arrow to the word I write on the blank line.

The Learning Network’s Word of the Day feature focuses on Tier Two words, and each entry includes a definition, an example of recent usage, and a quiz to test understanding. Above, for example, you can see a screenshot of the quiz for the word tantrum. Though these words are difficult for E.L.L.s, if students are adopting individual words, perhaps for a Word Wall, this is one way to “get to know” the word in depth.

Key any word you’re learning into the Times search field to explore the nuances of its meaning in different contexts.

And though words like “obsequious” may have been deemed too obscure for the new test, they remain worth learning in order to navigate the complexity of college-level texts and to communicate ideas clearly, as this essay illustrates.

What individual words would your students choose to learn more about? What will they discover?

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How do you teach Tier Two vocabulary to your students, whether they are English language learners or not? Tell us in the comments.